As Brits slept, the phishing gangs were up to their old tricks - spamming out SMS messages purporting to be warnings from Apple that our Apple IDs were due to expire today, and that we should act quickly.

“On July 1, Alanna Coca noticed her iPad had started beeping. When she opened the cover, the lock screen had a message displaying a phrase in Russian – “Dlya polucheniya parolya, napshite na email” – followed by a Gmail address.”

“Roughly translated, the phrase was telling her that in order to receive a password, she’ll need to email the address displayed.”

A message sent by the hacker to the locked device asks for the victim to get in touch to arrange the ransom payment, and may even make a veiled threat that the device’s data will be erased if cash is not transferred promptly.

What spices things up a little more this time is that Ragan reports rumours of a massive data breach at Apple potentially impacting 40 million iCloud accounts.

That may be nonsense, of course - it’s possible that accounts have fallen under the control of hackers because of less sensational reasons - such as poor password choices, phishing or reusing the same password on multiple sites.

What is clear is that some Apple users are having their devices hijacked by extortionists. So make sure that you have a unique, hard-to-crack, hard-to-guess password protecting your Apple ID account.